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UC Santa Barbara UC Santa Barbara Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Extreme Businessmen: Representations of Contemporary Corporate Life Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7td9b70w Author Aksoy, Can Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Extreme Businessmen: Representations of Contemporary Corporate Life A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Can Aksoy Committee in charge: Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh, Chair Professor Enda Duffy Professor Maurizia Boscagli September, 2014 The dissertation of Can Aksoy is approved. ____________________________________________ Enda Duffy ____________________________________________ Maurizia Boscagli ____________________________________________ Bishnupriya Ghosh, Committee Chair May 2014 Extreme Businessmen: Representations of Contemporary Corporate Culture Copyright © 2014 by Can Aksoy iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I was fortunate to have a committee that found my work exciting, and was not afraid to show it. To Bishnupriya Ghosh, thank you for arming me with the methodologies to bind together so many theories, and for your assurance that I should press on despite naysayers (as not everyone understands contemporary studies). To Enda Duffy, thank you for your warm, empathetic support, alongside your standards for writing quality. This improved my writing, and gave me the courage to develop. Last, to Maurizia Boscagli, thank you for provoking unexpected ideas. Ever since you compared my businessmen to James Bond, I have drawn strength from how you point out my work’s intersections with new worlds. I also would not have made it far without the love of my family and friends. To Patrick, thank you so much for you last minute editing. Your assistance was a lifesaver, and demonstrated what a valuable friend you are. Brianna, Nicole, and my dance community, thank you for helping me escape my dissertation into another athletic, artistic world. To my Dad, thank you for being enthusiastic enough to seek out connections for me. Your tutorials were invaluable in translating financial worlds into literary studies, and Mom, thank you for fantasizing about reading the finished product. Here it is! Sinan, thank you for support when I was low. I am lucky to have a younger brother who supports me like an older one. To my love, Aurélie Chevant: I would not have made it to this point without your love and support. Thank you for your diligence, helping me edit so many pages. Thank you for your admiration, thinking my work was valuable. Thank you for patience, in letting me interrupt you so frequently to ask for your thoughts. Thank you for your brilliance, spotting so many insights that had passed over my head. Last, thank you for your compassion, in reminding me that it was ok to let go of the stress that I always grip to. I love you darling. iv VITA OF CAN AKSOY September 2014 EDUCATION Doctor of Philosophy in English, University of California, Santa Barbara Sept 2014 Master of Arts in English, University of California, Santa Barbara June 2011 Bachelor of Arts in English, Claremont McKenna College, Claremont (Honors) May 2007 FIELDS OF STUDY Materialist Theory & Narratives of Business Culture Risk Theory British & American Postmodernism, Turkish-American Literature Writing Instruction & Pedagogy PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENT Teaching Assistant (English Department, UCSB) 2007 - 2011 Teaching Associate (English Department, UCSB / Writing Department, UCSB) 2012 - 2013 Adjunct Facility (Los Angeles Valley College) 2013 - 2014 SCHOLARLY PRESENTATIONS Sexy Neutrality: Chaotic Social Metaphysics In Michel Houellebecq’s Platform - Graduate Center for Literary Research Graduate Roundtable, UC Santa Barbara 2013 Junkie Supermen: Generalized Risk, Neoclassical Economics and Cocaine in Bright Lights, Big City - The Santa Barbara Global Studies Conference: Crisis, UC Santa Barbara 2012 Leisure Class Gangster: Thorstein Veblen’s Leisure Class Theory In Gangster Rap - Music & Crisis: An Interdisciplinary Music Conference, UC Santa Barbara 2012 Shadowboxing: The Futility of Middle Class Economic Resistance in “Fight Club” - Contagion / Control: Speculative Futures Graduate Colloquium, UC Santa Barbara 2012 Urban Claustrophobia: A Reading of Familial Interaction in “The Bastard of Istanbul” - North East Modern Language Association Conference, Boston 2009 PUBLICATIONS “Urban Claustrophobia: A Reading of Familial Interaction in ‘The Bastard of Istanbul.’” Journal of Turkish Literature, 2009: Issue 6 v ABSTRACT Extreme Businessmen: Representations of Contemporary Corporate Life By Can Aksoy This dissertation advances an emerging critical interest in contemporary financial culture by both identifying a new genre, financial culture literature, and by theorizing its depictions of “80s businessmen” as iconic of late capitalism. I describe this genre’s development in canonical and non-canonical works from the last three decades through sociological theories of risk (especially financial risk), and a history of Western economic practice. My dissertation first establishes financial culture literature’s genealogy in modernist novels like Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier (1912) and later in post-war novels like Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road (1961), texts that depict how business culture absorbs white-collar workers figures into paradoxically alienated, yet extreme social lives of starched-collar efficiency. Against this backdrop, I explain how the trade of new, massively lucrative credit “products” (derivatives, securities, junk bonds) made possible by Reaganomics’ deregulation of banking practices created a new, bizarre class of risk-loving, fast-buck financiers, extreme in their disconnection from social responsibility and socioeconomic realities. Financial culture literature both critiques and glamorizes these figures; novels and films that represent the 80s businessman’s glamorous world of vi penthouses and tinted windows with the extreme, shocking, or macabre, in order to unmask the businessman’s heroic gambler’s bravado as a form of corporatized violence and hedonism. Consequently, my dissertation reveals how fictional characters such as the film Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko (1987) and American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman (1991) are paradigmatic of an emerging literary tradition critical of (and fascinated by) the unsustainable life of new corporate worlds. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction…………………………..…………………………..…………………..……….1 I. Critical Genealogies of Contemporary Extreme Satires of Financial Culture…………....21 A. Financial Glamour In American Industrial Age Literature B. Extremity & Alienated White-Collar Labor In Post WW2 Novels C. Looking Forward to Contemporary Businessmen II. Postmodern Business Culture: Endemic Consumerism and Riskless Sociality…………67 A. Rolex, Suspenders, Briefcase: 1980s Corporate Maxims for Cultural Success B. Invisible Handshake: Neoliberal Staging & Cultural Consent C. Money Makes Money: Credit, Derivatives, and Professional Training D. Satiric Examples of 80s Businessmen E. I Can Stop Whenever I Want: Extremity and Corporate Addictions To Risk III. Character Aesthetics: The Extreme 80s Businessman in Late Capital...………………101 A. American Psycho & The Exaggerated Thematic of Extreme Businessmen B. Fight Club & Mimetic Imitations of White-Collar Victimhood C. Bright Lights Big City & Businessmen as Synthetic Entertainment D. Conclusion IV. Political Extensions: Professional Masculinity and Literary Stereotypes of Financial Femininity…………………………………………………………………….…141 A. Adventurer Playboys: Social Idealizations of Financial Masculinities B. Pretty Woman: Prostitutes & Synthetic Fantasies of Buying Power C. American Psycho: Socialites & Thematic Extremity D. Secretary: Supportive Secretaries & Mimetic Suffering E. Conclusion Works Cited………….…………………………..…………………………..……………172 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. “The Eyes of Satan”…………………………..…………………………………..80 ix Introduction: And what secret formula had Stratton discovered that allowed all these obscenely young kids to make such obscene amounts of money? For the most part, it was based on two simple truths: first that a majority of the richest one percent of Americans are closet degenerate gamblers, who can’t withstand the temptation to keep rolling the dice again and again even if they know the dice are loaded against them; and, second, that contrary to previous assumptions, young men and women who possess the collective social graces of a heard of sex-crazed water buffalo and have an intelligence quotient in the range of Forest Gump on three hits of acid, can be taught to sound like Wall Street wizards, so long as you keep drilling it into their heads again and again… - Jordon Belfort, The Wolf Of Wall Street (2007) Martin Scorsese’s filmic adaptation (2014) of stockbroker Jordan Belfort’s memoir The Wolf of Wall Street (2007) has revived an old debate: can the reckless capitalism of 80s businessmen be represented critically? The film animates the memoir’s ethically grey depiction of Belfort’s coked-up “life of unbridled hedonism” (Belfort 10), one enabled by the proudly exploitative capitalism of a stockbroker agency that defrauded investors with penny stock scams. Although Belfort’s introduction claims that the memoir is a “cautionary tale… to anyone who decides to go to the dark side of the force and live a life of unbridled hedonism” (11), its